department of design and architecture master of design

Department of Design and Architecture

Master of Design

SOUNDSCAPE LOOKS LIKE MUSIC

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design

Anna Giudice

03 | 2015

Department of Design and Architecture Master of Design

SOUNDSCAPE LOOKS LIKE MUSIC


Anna Giudice 111074-3219

Thesis Advisor: Jóhannes Dagsson 03 | 2015

ABSTRACT Analysis and knowledge are required in order to obtain awareness and understanding of

sensory data, sound in this case, to process what we perceive and to derive some meaning.

It is possible to capture small details in the environment and take them all in to see the whole.

The aim of my research is to explore the connections between sound and perception through

the decoding of physics rules, cultural aspects, and parameters contained in sound. This

research is about looking for something in a focused and systematic way, to create a new

knowledge through active experimentation and also interpretation of new sound sensations.

This project explores listening to “noise” to develop a new attitude to understanding sounds

and music in order to arrive at a new way of thinking that helps the listeners understand the

shapes of sound through analytic investigation. This research could be a help for designers,

city planners, musicians, artists and those who want to experience new perceptions.

My thesis project will support these goals and my conclusion will discuss the objectives

proposed in this paper.

Keywords: Design, Sound, Soundscape, Perception, Acoustic Environment

Cover illustration: Remix. Anna Giudice. 2015

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract……………………………………………..………3

Table of contents………………………………………..….4

List of figures………………………………………………5

1. Introduction………………………………….……….6

2. Noise and silence are sound…………………….……8

3. Semantics of the sound………………………………14

4. The perceived sound…………………………………17

5. Conclusion……………………………………….…..23

Bibliography........................................................................24

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LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1: Spectral analysis of music (ex.) Fig. 2: Spectral analysis of general sound (ex.)

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1. INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this study is to introduce some tools for dealing with sound in

design research. In this study, I will consider sound as an object in its own right. This

is a theoretical analysis which will attempt to change the perception of so-called

“noise,” which is often considered an annoying part of our soundscape, to a stimulus

that creates a positive experience.

The soundscape is the sonic environment of the world; it is any acoustic field

of study. A soundscape can be defined as a musical composition, radio programs, a

forest or a school or an isolated acoustic environment. The soundscape has changed

over time; modern man exists in a sound environment much different than it was in

past.

In discussing the transition from the rural to the urban soundscape, I will be using two terms: hi-fi and lo-fi. They need to be explained. A hi-fi system is one possessing a favorable signal to - noise ratio. The hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level. The country is generally more hi-fi than the city; night more than day; ancient times more than modern. In the hi-fi soundscape, sounds overlap less frequently; there is perspective - foreground and background. 1

The sense of participation based on balance and consistency between human

expression and natural sounds is completely altered by the emergence of a

quantitatively immeasurable sound reality. In this situation, the individual becomes a

simple passive receptor, a spectator of an uncontrollable reality. The soundscape

necessarily implies a reference to a cultural, symbolic and social milieu. Using the

study of acoustic phenomena and coding theory, it is possible to reflect on

soundscapes in a meaningful way and thereby make it accessible to designers. The

questions to be examined are: What is relevant when we hear a sound and how can

knowledge affect the environment and human awareness? How should these sounds

be conceptualized?

1 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape. (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977).

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Analysis and knowledge are required in order to obtain awareness and

understanding of sensory data, sound in this case, to process what we perceive and to

derive some meaning. It is possible to capture small details in the environment and

take them all in to see the whole. The aim of my research is to explore the connections

between sound and perception through the decoding of physics rules, cultural aspects,

and parameters contained in sound. This research is about looking for something in a

focused and systematic way, to create a new knowledge through active

experimentation and also interpretation of new sound sensations. This project explores

listening to “noise” to develop a new attitude to understanding sounds and music in

order to arrive at a new way of thinking that helps the listeners understand the shapes

of sound through analytic investigation. This research could be a help for designers,

city planners, musicians, artists and those who want to experience new perceptions.

My thesis project will support these goals and my conclusion will discuss the

objectives proposed in this paper.

Theoretical research is, indeed, the base of my creative narrative that will

bring me to my final project. According to Brandon LaBelle,

Sound's locational intensity arrives through it in always already being there: before this writing starts, a sound is heard, its presence already passing, altered in the flows of molecules, cut up by mouths inhaling and speaking back into the air's modulations, trapping, letting go, and attenuating the plateau of the aural. Sound butts in, and then falls back, pushing forth its source, whether object, body, music, or movement, into the frame of perception. I stand by sound, and sound invades my space - it disrespects borders, as thereby making explicit the intensity of territory.2

This quotation encapsulates the aim of my projct: The object of my study is to

analyze the sound that breaks the boundaries LaBelle notes and fills all spaces to an

almost overbearing degree, which can then be isolated and understood. The sound that

enters the body and makes it alive; it permeates the space, yelling forcefully with its

being. In this paper, I will analyze the concept of sound, from music to silence; I will

interpret and analyze its perception, and how to catalog these soundscapes and make

them understandable according to the theory of musical object by Pierre Schaeffer.

2 Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

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1. NOISE AND SILENCE ARE SOUND

There are no differences between music and sound. Music is just a form of

noise and people tend to call music the thing that is appealing to them, or what

metaphorically represents beauty. The distinction is only a mathematical form not

related to perception: music is ordered sound and noise is disordered sound.

Music is an infinite and ordinate sum of sines and cosines multiplied by

coefficients. Therefore, this is the mathematical representation of music:

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3 Fourier transform function.

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Noise is a random spectral power distribution, much like the statistical

distributions of kinetic molecular theory.

with p(f) = constant

where:

p(ƒ) = the value of the power spectral density measured in W/Hz (used for theoretical discussions) or the relative power spectral density in V2/Hz (what normally gets used in practice)

ƒ = any frequency of sound in the range of human hearing

t P = he total power output of the source 4

However, the only noise that follows this rule is the white noise, a sound with

a flat frequency spectrum. White noise doesn't exist in reality, it is only an

idealization, since no device is able to generate a spectrum uniform for all

frequencies.

4 Music and Noise. http://physics.info/music/ (accessed October 28, 2015).

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Sounds are sometimes too strong, sometimes annoying, sometimes simply out

of place. How can they be reframed in context as something understandable and

therefore acceptable to the human ear? It is not just a matter of positively accepting

what is happening and to listening to the sounds with better preparation; I think it's

more a matter of how to interpret and decode what we perceive without feeling

something that is unpleasant to us, or without feeling something pleasant, which

makes the difference between a positive and negative sound experience.

The idea is to learn to isolate the sounds that are considered unsightly and to

perceive them as a stimulus that can be part of something not necessarily unpleasant

through interpretation and knowledge. From acoustics and psychoacoustics studies,

we have learned to interpret sound physically and we have considered how it affects

the brain. From arts and music, we know now how to create an ideal sound around us

that allows us to reflect both creatively and psychologically. Using the framework put

forth by Raymond Murray Schafer, composer, writer, music educator and

environmentalist, this work shows that it is possible to perceive the world as a great

macrocosmic musical composition.

When city dwellers remember their environment from a perspective of memory, individual sounds come into focus: dockyard work sirens, the one o’clock gun, the grinding sound of a tram’s wheels turning a corner. Some sounds are common to many urban environments, a shared soundscape, while others are particular to certain places. Either way, they enter into the memory of those who grew up in a specific environment, even if they remain unarticulated for long periods. Soundscapes attempt to preserve the sonic ‘view’ of a place at a particular time, in a similar way to a folklorist capturing stories and thereby an essence of a culture caught in time. The means of such preservation is, of course, a relatively recent phenomenon. The American sound designer David Sonnenschein has written of time’s effect on cityscapes, and their change and effect on how we live with sound: In the Paris of the 17th century, reports of noise included shouting, carts, horses, bells, artisans at work, etc. All these sounds came from specific directions and were very impulsive, rather than long constant tones, with few low frequencies.5

It is catching these sounds, which are moments and memories, which marks

the direction of my study. When the perspective is lost and when the strong symbolic

character is no longer identifiable, sound shows its shape and structure. According to

5 Seán Street, The Memory of Sound: Preserving the Sonic Past. (London: Routledge, 2015).

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Professor David Novak, writing about the composer and music theorist John Cage, the

sound perceived as annoying or inappropriate is, in popular culture, defined as noise:

Noise is typically separated from music on the ground of aesthetic value. Music is constituted by beautiful, desirable sounds, and noise is composed of sound that are unintentional and unwanted. But if noise is non-musical, music is noisy, and noise sounds have always been part of music.6

Noise is a socially considered a component of the industrial and post-industrial

city, in contrast to the pleasant sounds of nature. In ecological terms, it is the contrast

between the degradation and pollution with the quiet and peace of sounds that evoke

desires for peace. The perception of everything that is not generated as music or from

intellectual development as opposed to the noise generated by the social and human

actions is just considered as something casual and not noteworthy.

The noise, therefore, lives in a context of sensory experience, a combination of

elements driven by the process of listening and understanding language that

categorizes what is good and what is bad, and it is often contrasted, in Western

culture, with silence. Silence does not evoke anything and too often is associated with

death. Silence, then, is the symbol of the isolation of man is manifested in the loss of

the senses. It is the same silence that can be considered as a break between two sounds

or a break between two architectures. But as Dave Novak notes, "where none of these

is present, Silence Becomes something else - not silence at all, but sounds, the

ambients sounds. [...] These sounds are called silence only Because They do not form

part of a musical intention."7 In John Cage's musical composition "4'33 ", the silent

pause of the pianist becomes amplified by the silence of waiting spectators. It is a

silence that becomes sound, which is enriched with breaths, with small movements,

expectations and pathos.

Silence, concept Extra Homo, becomes emotional manipulation. The idea of

silence is concentrated on something impossible to hear and is measured by non-

human perception. It is less than 20 decibels, which the human ear is not capable of

picking up, which precludes all the sounds of life. The human ear, deprived of this

6 Dave Novak, 'Noise' in Keywords in Sound. (London: Duke University Press, 2015).

7 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

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sense projected outward, amplifies the sound inside the human body. But although it

is not audible to the human ear, the "silence" continues to live as a sound and emits

vibrations, beats, and sends signals to the surrounding environment.

It is, in a state of vibration. It is therefore making a sound, but we don't yet know what that sound is. The physicist can prove what we already suspect, but we can't hear those vibrations. When I went into the anechoic chamber, I could hear myself. Well, now, instead of listening to myself, I want to listen to this ashtray. But I won't strike it as I would a percussion instrument. I am going to listen to its inner life thanks to a suitable technology. While in the case of the ashtray, we are indeed dealing with an object. It would be extremely interesting to place it in a little anechoic chamber and to listen to it through a suitable sound system. Object would become a process; we would discover, thanks to a procedure borrowed from science, the meaning of nature through the music of objects. 8 This is the primordial concept expressed by Pythagoras who reported a

celestial music produced by the Universe. The movements of the planets are made up

of rhythms, numbers and proportions. Musical intervals are the basis of the Cosmos as

a system balanced and the seven known planets, including the sun and the moon, they

correspond to the seven natural notes. From here it follows the vision of the planetary

spheres that make up the paradise of Dante that produce a celestial music with their

perpetual rotate.

Or as Italo Calvino in the short story "Il cielo di pietra" tells of vibrations

coming from the atmosphere and unfamiliar voices that capture people from the

planet Earth.

And so the rhythms of body fluids are amplified, the hiss of breath through the

trachea inflates the lungs, muscles and nerves contract and relax, the skin vibrates. It

is introspection in its essence, a silence that becomes deafening noise and that leads to

madness. Through the body it is possible to reach the awareness of boundaries.

According to Professor Debora Kapchan, "the resonant body, the intramodal body, the

sonic affective body, the postphenomenal body, the technobody, the transgendered

body. Adjectives proliferate. The body persists.”9

8 John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds. (Boston: M. Boyars, 1981). 9 Debora Kapchan, 'Bodye' in Keywords in Sound. (London: Duke University Press, 2015).

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It is through the body, through the physical shape of the ears, you can feel the

vibrations and translating them into the perceived mental image. The human ear can

perceive sound in every direction by conveying a sense of that which is introspective,

inside, through the body. The body is fully immersed in this experience, soaked in it.

Only then will the intellect try to associate the sound with an idea and will tend to

sort, within defined borders formed by the individual´s understanding of music, those

sounds of music and not music.

Through the projection of the sound it gives a psychological imprinting. As

philosopher Alva Noë says,

Perception is a causal concept, but it is also a concept of a kind of action. Perception depends on how things are, and it depends on what we do. When we perceive, we keep track not only of how things are, but of our changing relation to how things are. In the natural world, however, it may be that the only way to preserve the right kinds of dependence relations between experience and the world is by the standard, biologically realized ways with which we are familiar. From a certain standpoint, artificial perceptual systems are very much like biological ones. Importantly, the inadequacy of such systems is in direct proportion to the degree to which they are different from ordinary, biological systems.10

10 Alva Noë, Causation and Perception: The Puzzle Unravelled. (Santa Cruz: University of California, 2003).

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SEMANTIC OF THE SOUND

The act of listening requires a skill more refined than the one of feeling. The

French composer Pierre Schaffer notes that the act of listening is created in four

actions for different intensity, interest and knowledge. The four actions are

intrinsically related to the semantics of the musical structure and the basic grammar of

the concept itself. They are: to listen, to hear, to understand and to comprehend.11

Listening is defined as having an interest related to sound and a tender ear to

listen to it. For Schaffer, "to listen" is an immediate activation of a familiar figurative

landscape. Listening means to return the sound to the mind that immediately activates

stereotypes and visions related thereto.12

As Douglas Kahn says:

[It is] introduced on a social scale a newly pervasive, detailed, and atomistic encoding of sound, gathering up all the visual, literary, environmental, gestural, and affective elements they brushed up against. Sound proliferated by incorporating a greater divergence of cultural codes and worldly sources and generated still greater variety through internal means; the sheer number of sounds increased as they became freighted with multiple allusions and meanings. Sound themselves have multiple personalities and the nature of sound became less natural. 13

According to Algirdas Greimas, "The listening allows immediate

reconstruction of the frame figurative. There is, therefore, a cogency of listening that

is derived from being willing act.”14 The conceptualization of the vague moment in

the complex process that transforms the subject in terms of the narrative dimension,

except for those related to the size of the senses. This concept expresses that the

semiotics of the image are related to the perception, which follows the

phenomenological model of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

11 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux: Essai Interdisciplines. (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1966). 12 Ibid. 13 Douglas Kahn, John Cage: Silence and Silencing. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 14 Algirdas Julien Greimas, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

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The most magical moment of the four states is that moment when the

individual is in ecstasy and he perceives something unexpected.

This happens not only in the artwork but also in behaviors (actions) and in

everyday objects. Perception is, for Merleau-Ponty, openness to the world; it is our

introduction into being.15 This does not mean that perception is immediately

transparent to itself; Merleau-Ponty thinks that the perception does not deliver its

essence; rather, "it is buried under sediments of knowledge and must be conquered by

a work comparable to that of an archaeologist."16

And it is this knowledge that I try to bring out to the sound through my work.

As Noë notes, "Visual experience does not arise because an internal representation of

the world is activated in some brain area. On the contrary, visual experience is a mode

of activity involving practical knowledge about currently possible behaviors and

associated sensory consequences. Visual experience rests on know-how, the

possession of skills."17 Noë refers to images but the same process of the visual

experience is applicable to the sound as it implies, equally, the possession of

knowledge.

It is the “Heterodox” view that maintains that an understanding of perception

must include facts about the environment in which a perceiver is situated and the

extracranial activities. Noë takes into consideration the role of the perceiver,

perception involves a great deal of behavior on the part of the perceiver. Perceivers

move around things, with different heights, different diopters. All of these behaviors

are important for how perception is actually achieved.

On the other hand, hearing is a passive approach to sound. The subject is

invested in the sound even if it is not voluntary. The information that comes to the

subject is less clear, the sounds are perceived as an indistinguishable background;

auditory information is continuous but apparently inaccurate. The brain incorporates

sounds but doesn't process them; it doesn't encode this input properly and turns it into

the expected images. The composer Michel Chion, paraphrasing Schaeffer, writes:

“‘Ouir, is to perceive with the ear, to be struck by sounds, it is the lowest, most 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Donald A. Landes. Phenomenology of Perception. (London: Routledge, 2012). 16 Colin Smith, Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception. (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2002). 17 Daniel Dennett, Center for Cognitive Studies. (Medford: Tufts University, 2002).

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elementary level of perception; one passively ‘‘hears’’ many things that one neither

seeks nor listens to (ecouter) nor understands (comprendre)’. ”18

The third of the actions is understanding: The ear not only detects the sound

and sends the information to the brain but is driven by the intention to hear it, select it

and process it in the consciousness. With this action, the cultural component becomes

predominant. The intention of the subject is driven not only from instinctively but also

from his background.

Finally, there is the action of understanding. Understanding means "to see

under, to see deeply” and to become master of one´s own perception. The

understanding requires an analysis of the listening semantic of the listening object.

Being "signs to be interpreted" and not dependent only on the level of attention and

listen. For the linguist Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, everything is a sign because we

transform such input when we create an interaction. A sign that wasn't created

specifically as a sign can play an instrumental extra-semiotic role even when working

(or not working) as a sign. These signs are both natural, that is, found in nature, and

cultural, that is, human artifacts produced to fulfill functions other than that of signs.19

18 Michel Chion, Guide Des Objets Sonores. Pierre Schaeffer Et La Recherche Musicale. (Paris: Buchet-Chastel , 1983). 19 Ferruccio Landi, Metodica Filosofica E Scienza Dei Segni: Nuovi Saggi Sul Linguaggio E L'ideologia. (1a ed. Milano: Bompiani, 1985).

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THE PERCEIVED SOUND

For the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, signs are inherent in all "being" but

their development is only possible in a human context.20 And even for Schaeffer,

"reduced listening" is the attitude of listening to the sound itself, as a sound object,

abstracting from its origin, real or supposed.21 It has carried out a real removal of the

sound source from the perception of the listener in order to perceive the sound object

in its morphological structure. The act of leaving aside some of our listening habits is

a voluntary act that allows us to explain many phenomena implicit in our perception.

Since this type of listening is to strip the sound of all that is not really inherent in

himself, paying attention only to the latter in its materiality, in its essence, in its size

sensitive.

Before you can access the reduced listening mode, through awareness and

knowledge, you need to go through some of deconditioning exercises, in order to be

aware of the reflections listening "Reference" and to become able to suspend them at

the appropriate time. Listening reduction, however, retains a link with the ordinary

ratings of sound: it is about changing the direction of our interest, stopping to listen to

an event through the sound it produces and therefore cease to hear the sound as an

event sound. This direct approach to listening only to the sound itself, is the main

focus of my project. According to R.M. Schafer,

Any sound phenomenon can be taken[…] like the words of a language[,] for its relative meaning or its actual substance.In that its meaning predominates, and this is what we play with, it is literature and not music. But how can we forget its meaning, isolate it from the sound phenomenon? This requires two prior operations: Distinguishing an element(listening to it in itself, for its texture, its material, itscolour). Repeating it. Repeat the same sound fragment twice: the event is replaced by music.22

20 Susan Petrilli, Lavoro Immateriale. (Roma: Meltemi, 2004). 21 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux: Essai Interdisciplines. (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1966). 22 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World. (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1977).

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The idea to extrapolate the sound source from the environment has already

been taken into account by the philosopher mathematician Pythagoras. He used to

hide behind a curtain while teaching his classes to allow students to concentrate only

on the words and concepts and not on the expressions and gestures of the presenter.

This concept is expressed by the word "Acusmatic," which derives from the greek

ἀκουσµατικοί, "listeners," and describes sounds you hear without specifying the

cause. This particular practice of listening can decouple view from hearing, which

encourages listening to audio sources without interference, allowing repetition. The

repeating sound lets you hear in different directions in order to understand the

different hues. This is fits well into the methodology of my studies.

Through a sound recording you can create cuts and inversions, rings,

transposition, sampling, compression, gels (freezing), reverberation, echoes, delays,

filtering, mixing, and accumulation.

Thus we see that—with or without words—radio is sound. This is why its imaginative power is so great, and why we can summon its prompts from memory when provoked to do so by the right question or an involuntary trigger. Beyond the technical, we might see ourselves as receivers, with the capacity for tuning in to the world around us. The ears of a person with unimpaired hearing are never closed, so imaginative sound will constantly have to compete with the currency of the sound we are absorbing as ‘receivers’. The Belgian sound artist Stijn Demeulenaere has written: ‘When asked to remember a sound, to recreate it in our heads, we have to rely a lot more on our imagination, our cross-links between feelings, thoughts and memories to attempt to hear it again. And by using that imagination, we explore what it was that made a certain sound special to us, and why it stuck with us.23

As I pointed out before, it is important to interpret and decode the sound to be

able to understand its internal structure, its morphology, as defined by Shaeffer.

Morphology identifies sounds and characteristic of sounds: pitch, intensity and

timbre, and it is therefore the study of the sound object as a structure, or its context:

looking inward that aims at a description of its physical properties. The qualification

of the object, which is supposed to be described, has seven morphological criteria that

are divided according to the axis of form/matter.

Typology identifies sounds by category. The typological criteria are a property of the

perceived sound that allows you to identify, categorize, qualify and analyze it of

23 Seán Street, The Memory of Sound: Preserving the Sonic Past. (London: Routledge, 2015).

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criteria sound identification of the objects Are taken into consideration pairs, which

are then isolated and classified by types.

In the creation of his system of typology of sound, Schaeffer formulated six

typological criteria.

Mass/Facture

The mass is a characteristic of the sound object and represents the content of

heights. Facture identifies the way that energy is communicated and is

manifested in life.

Duration/Variation

The duration is the time of the object as it is experienced psychologically,

while the variation, defined as something that changes a function of time,

represents something that resembles the speed.

Balance/Originality

To balance means something variable, the facture of the sound object, between

the "too structured and too simple." Originality is, however, the ability of the

object to be different compared to what was previously predicted…24

Schaeffer adds seven criteria when speaking of types of sound: mass, dynamic,

harmonic timbre, melodic profile, mass profile, grain and allure. These are defined as

follows:

Mass: Sound object analysis

Dynamic: Evolution of the sound field intensity.

Harmonic Timbre: Features related to the mass that allows to qualify the

sound.

Melodic Profile: General profile drawn by the sound in its texture.

Mass Profile: General profile of a sound of which the mass is sculpted by

internal variations.

24 Pierre Schaeffer, Traité Des Objets Musicaux: Essai Interdisciplines. (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1966).

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Grain: Microstructure of the material sound that evokes the texture of a fabric

or a mineral.

Allure: Oscillation, vibrato, characteristics of the development of sound25

What I find useful to my study is the consideration of sound as if it were a

phoneme. The sound is considered as a single unit that stands out from all others even

if only as a variant. In order for two different sounds to be perceived differently, one

needs only to change one parameter. The sound in question is based on a notion that

deviates from the ordinary meaning, which considers it as a random and useless

object. It is a concept that includes everything we perceive with hearing, including

what is commonly called "noise." It is everything that has the ability to convey a

particular aesthetic quality.

The sound that I intend to analyze is a pure sound that tends not to recall

images or melodies of cultural notes. It is a sound of context wherein I will endeavor

not to put off thousands of years of history of harmony and I will try not to move

within the expected conventions and codifications of music. The human mind has a

strong ability to empathize with the source generating the sound and even more with

the technical capacity or the artistic expression of the performer. According to

psychologist Carl Seashore:

The necessity of living in a world of representation tends to bring out vivid visual imagery as well as imagery in the other senses, because there is a general tendency to reinstate, in the representation of a sensory experience, the whole of the origin setting. Thus a musician not only hears the music but often lives it out so realistically in his imagination and memory that he sees and feels a response to the persons, instruments, or total situation in the rendition presented. Without the warmth of experience, music would lose its essential esthetic nature.26

And again, to explain the importance of isolating the sound from its context in order

to be able to understand its essence, Wilhelm Meister, Goethe´s character, said:

They spoil us at the theatre; the music there is, as it were, subservient to the eye; it accompanies movements, not emotions. In oratorios and concerts, the form of the musician constantly disturbs us: true music is intended for the ear alone; a fine voice is the most universal thing that can be figured; and while the narrow individual that uses it presents himself before the eye, he cannot fail to trouble the effect of that pure

25 Ibid. 26 Calrl Seashore, Psychology of Music. (New York: Dover Publications, 1967).

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universality. The person whom I am to speak with, I must see, because it is a solitary man, whose form and character gives worth or worthlessness to what he says: but, on the other hand, whoever sings to me must be invisible; his form must not confuse me, or corrupt my judgment. Here, it is but one human organ speaking to another; it is not spirit speaking to spirit, not a thousandfold world to the eye, not a heaven to the man.’ On the same principles, in respect of instrumental music, he required that the orchestra should as much as possible be hid; because by the mechanical exertions, by the mean and awkward gestures of the performers, our feelings are so much dispersed and perplexed. Accordingly he always used to shut his eyes while hearing music; thereby to concentrate his whole being on the single pure enjoyment of the ear.27

We face the ἐποχή practice, or the suspension of judgment that the philosopher

Edmund Husserl sees in his theory. Husserl calls "intentional correlation" between

data and the way of givenness, the inseparable link between what is objectively given

and the subjective experience by which the objective fact is manifested.28

Expectation induces the perceiver to focus his attention on particular aspects

of the sensory stimulation. This can help to understand or it can distort perceptions,

too. What you have to put in brackets in the case of music are all the prejudices that

have always affected the history of music and/or the sound object, until finally

reaching a pure perception, which does not exist outside of an individual´s perception.

It is precisely this notion of sound objects that lends itself well to act as a witness to

the ideal of an aesthetic theory that focuses on perceptual peculiarities of attention

during an artistic enjoyment. It is precisely in this that the creak of a door opening in

my listening room is different from the creak of the door opening that can be heard in

the "Variations on a Door and a Sigh" by Pierre Henry.

For the squeaking we hear in our room, we know the cause. While it is "pure"

in the sense just specified, the importance is what we hear repeatedly in the variations.

The creaking in the work by Henry is recorded on tape and repeated several

times, manipulated through a sampler and, by this process, is materialized. It is for

this reason that it conveys an aesthetic attention, which however, distinguishes it from

creak we hear every day in our room. Not only that, the squeak which is heard in my

27 Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe and Thomas Carlyle. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874). 28 Hubert Dreyfus, Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).

22

room is "functional," meaning a response to the stimuli of the environment, when it is

assumed that a work of art is never functional. 29

No one would dream of using the urinal of Marcel Duchamp in the museum

where it is displayed, even in the case of incontinence! Similarly, no one listening to

the variations of Henry would turn to see who is entering his room at the moment that

he perceived the squeak. The sound here is considered for what it is, only for its purity

and its part within the physical composition. The only difference between a musical

note and a sound is that the first is determined while the second is indeterminate. This

is similar to the way we speak of regular polygons and irregular polygons. Both are

part of the set of polygons and regular polygons are a subset. For regular polygons,

there is a relationship between the side of the polygon and the apothem and then the

formula to calculate area and perimeter never changes.

Like the readymades of Duchamp, therefore, the sounds of concrete music are

an important example of how attention-perceptual changes depend on the context in

which we find ourselves. According to the theory on attention aesthetic espoused by

the philosopher Nicolas J. Bullot, "certain artistic devices are based on inhibition

processes of subsets of routines that typically monitor the attention object-based

space-time."30 We can consider the sound, or rather the sound object, as theorized by

Schaeffer, like objects of space and time which are usually anchored in our daily

attention. This is the point of my research. Evaluating objects in the space-time theory

of Bullot’s object-based sound and Schaeffer’s “musique concrete” could prove a

valuable addition to current aesthetic theories on attention. The objects of space and

time are anchored in perceptual processes that Bullot calls routine, e.g. those

perceptual processes "developed through the learning performance of recurrent

acts.”31

29 Stefano Bianchi, La musica futurista. Ricerche e documenti. (Arsina, Libreria Musicale Italiana Editrice, 1995).

30 Nicolas J. Bullot. Objects and aesthetic attention. (Interdisciplines, Interdisciplines, 2003).

31 Ibid.

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CONCLUSION

At this moment, I do not know yet what will be my final project. My intention

is to work on soundscape, to isolate its sounds, whether natural or artificially

produced, and return pure. The final result could be a collective machine that

stimulates ownership of the environment, bringing together people of all ages and

backgrounds, to feel sound in different way, to appreciate each sound for its own

value.

This big device can teach to people about how sounds are created, inviting

them to play together, create their own "city landscape" in a big musical ensemble.

When people play all together, it possible to compose a sound piece in cooperation, to

connect to one another and to have a sense of ownership of space due to the sound

they create. The sound composition is a great way to understand how the single unit

can be part of a larger composition. I can define my research as research through

design, of which the aim is communicate new knowledge through a methodological

process.

The breakdown of barriers between ordinary attention to sounds and the

aesthetic perception of same forms the basis of my research. Everything is a sound

object, according to Schaeffer and his school, and all that is the sound object itself has

the same right to be considered art, because in certain contexts all sounds, from noise

to note, from the noise of the city to the squeak of a door, are able to convey attention

aesthetics. In this way, they inhibit the normal processes of routines to which typically

turn. After making a pure sound-object, it has become a potential art object.

The interpretation of the environment is determined by the interaction of the

biological structure of brain and by the cerebral synthesis. The knowledge adds

elements that the body cannot perceive, changing the way to understand. Emotions

routinely affect how and what we perceive.

24

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alighieri, Dante. La Divina Commedia. 1a ed. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1985. Bianchi, Stefano. La musica futurista. Ricerche e documenti. Arsina, Libreria

Musicale Italiana Editrice, 1995. Bullot, Nicolas J. Objects and aesthetic attention. Interdisciplines, Interdisciplines,

2003. Cage, John, and D. Charles. For the Birds. Boston: M. Boyars, 1981. Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University

Press, 1961. Calvino, Italo. Tutte Le Cosmicomiche. Milano: A. Mondadori, 1997. Chion, Michel. Guide Des Objets Sonores. Pierre Schaeffer Et La Recherche

Musicale. Paris: Buchet-Chastel , 1983. Dennett, Daniel. Center for Cognitive Studies. Medford: Tufts University, 2002. Dreyfus, Hubert. L. Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Mass.:

MIT Press, 1982. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, and T. Carlyle. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and

Travels. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. Semiotics and Language an Analytical Dictionary.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Kahn, Douglas. John Cage: Silence and Silencing. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1997.

25

Kapchan, Debora. 'Bodye' in Keywords in Sound. London: Duke University Press, 2015.

LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York:

Bloomsbury, 2012. Landi, Ferruccio. Metodica Filosofica E Scienza Dei Segni: Nuovi Saggi Sul

Linguaggio E L'ideologia. 1a ed. Milano: Bompiani, 1985. Merleau - Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge, 2002. Noë, Alva. Causation and Perception: The Puzzle Unravelled. Santa Cruz: University

of California, 2003. Novak, Dave. 'Noise' in Keywords in Sound. London: Duke University Press, 2015. Petrilli, Susan. Lavoro Immateriale. Roma: Meltemi, 2004. Seashore, Carl E. Psychology of Music. New York: Dover Publications, 1967. Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité Des Objets Musicaux: Essai Interdisciplines. Paris: Éditions

Du Seuil, 1966. Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape. Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977. Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1977. Smith, Colin. Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception. Taylor &

Francis, 2002. Street, Seán. The Memory of Sound: Preserving the Sonic Past. London: Routledge,

2015.

REYKJAVIK SOUNDSCAPE

Department of Design and Architecture

Master of Design


Anna Giudice 2016

3

A Document Submitted to:The Department of Design and Architecture, Iceland Academy of the Arts,

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design, 2016

Mentor MA project | Thesis: Guðbjörg Rannveig Jóhannesdóttir MA project | Design work: Guðmundur Oddur Magnússon

This thesis is 4 ECTS credit hours of a total of 30 credit hours final project towards the de-gree of Master of Design. The written content of this publication as well as the images

are the responsibility of the author.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without a written permission of the publisher: Iceland Academy of the Arts, Þverholti 1, 105 Reykjavik, Iceland. References to this publication shall be as follows (Chicago Style):

Anna Giudice, Reykjavik Soundscape, Reykjavik: Iceland Academy of the Arts, 2016.

REYKJAVIK SOUNDSCAPE

4 Reykjavik Soundscape

Goddur, my mentor.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of contents..................................

Abstract................................................

Acknowledgements..............................

Introduction..........................................

Field of study........................................

Methodology........................................

Rules.....................................................

Conclusion...........................................

Appendix..............................................

Bibliography.........................................

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ABSTRACT

The aim of my project is to explore the connections between sound and perception through the decoding of physics rules, cultural aspects, and parameters contained within sound.

This research is about looking for something in a focused and systematic way, to cre-ate new knowledge through active social experimentation and also interpretation of new sound sensations.

The Reykjavik Soundscape is a board game created in order to help designers to come up with ideas. It is a tool designed to understand and transform the city sound-scape. This project explores listening to “noise” to develop a new attitude to under-standing sounds and music in order to arrive at a new way of thinking that helps the listeners understand the shapes of sound through analytic investigation.

This approach can help designers, city planners, architects, understand how sounds are created, inviting them to play together, to create their own “city landscape” in a big musical ensemble. When people play all together, it is possible to compose a sto-ry using sound and memory in cooperation, to connect to one another and to have a sense of ownership of space due to the sound they create. The storytelling is a great way to understand how the single unit can be part of a larger composition.

7

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor Guðbjörg Rannveig Jóhannesdóttir (Gugga) and my mentor Guðmundur Oddur Magnússon (Goddur), for their guid-ance, support and for their friendship, which gave me the possibility to learn and grow personally and professionally during my Master studies.

I would like to thanks my colleages and friends Shuyi, Eusun, Sinead, Ma and Ma-ria and teachers Johannes, Dora, Halldor, Thomas, Massimo, Hlin at LHI, for their friendship and support in the academic world and every-day life.

A big thanks goes to Fabio, Valeria, Nicola and Kyriaki.


Sound experiment.

9

INTRODUCTION

The Reykjavik Soundscape is a board game created in order to help designers to come up with ideas. It is a journey throughout the city and its sound. The aim of this project is to explore the connections between sound and perception through the decoding of phys-ics rules, cultural aspects, and parameters contained within sound.

This game was inspired by The Game of the Goose, a race game of unknown origins in Europe in the 16th century. Like The Game of the Goose , players will move their to-kens on a virtual walk through the board, which is printed with a cityscape. The tokens will be shaped like cats!

The Reykjavik Soundscape is a tool designed to understand and transform the city soundscape. It is about looking specifically at sound to create an experience, examining one´s reactions and perceptions. It enhances creativity, and also promotes idea genera-tion and design thinking, while raising awareness about environmental and social issues.

Begin by choosing a particular group issue that you are currently dealing with, one that you would like to resolve by playing at The Reykjavik Soundscape. Using the 120 cards, representing sounds and actions, walking throughout the city, players have to tell a story.

The city of Reykjavik provides an excellent study typology because the entire city en-vironment is condensed into a small, densely populated space.

This approach can help designers, city planners, architects, understand how sounds are created, inviting them to play together, to create their own “city landscape” in a big musical ensemble. When people play all together, it is possible to compose a story using sound and memory in cooperation, to connect to one another and to have a sense of own-ership of space due to the sound they create. Storytelling is a great way to understand how the single unit can be part of a larger composition.

Put into practice, the theory of the soundscape as I describe here represented as an ex-perience journey can inspire a new approach to the creation of city guides, urban solu-tions, installations and new creative solutions to define a standard of quality of the life of citizens. The journey proposes a new approach for understanding city development projects, through an investigation into the relationships between soundscape and city. I define my research as research through design, of which the aim is to communicate new knowledge through a methodological process.

My objective is to change the perception of sound as an element of a given environ-


ment to those who imagine sound as being invisible and intangible (Figure 1); because of this, it is often overlooked and people are seldom aware of the soundscape surround-ing them. Our sense of vision often seems more dominant than our sense of hearing, yet sound plays a fundamental role in our everyday lives, especially in detecting danger, making communication and providing orientation in a physical space.

Each individual organizes sound in their own way (Figure 2); the thing that most fasci-nates me is the perception of sound in the brain. At the beginning, the sound of environ-ment around me is like a background buzz, but slowly becomes something that can be reimagined as an orchestra playing a symphony. It is a sound that I cannot control, but I can perceive in a different way: in the active voice and the passive voice. In its passive form, it is possible to be lulled by the sound or it is possible to become really annoyed; in the active form, it is possible to isolate individual sounds without identifying the source; in effect, letting the melody make up its own mind.

New tools are necessary to further explore the complexities of perception of sound. In the first part of this analysis, I will introduce the research field. In the second part, I

will analyze my design approach from the methodological point of view; finally, I will describe the parameters and rules that led to the final result.

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Figure 1. Sound is invisible and intangible.

Figure 2. Individual organizes sound in their own way.


FIELD OF STUDY

Our daily experience is produced by perception. In architecture and design context, sight has been historically privileged over the other senses. In the early sixties, Jane Jacobs stressed the importance of visual order in the city1, and Kevin Lynch focused on the visual dimensions of urban design.2 The senses of hearing and smell, for in-stance, are regarded negatively in contemporary urban research, as something that dis-turbs our lives: a pungent odor, a deafening noise. A first positive reference is found in studies by Juhani Pallasmaa, wherein he notes:

Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, where-as sound is omni-directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creates an experience of interiority. I regard an object, but sound ap-proaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives. Buildings do not re-act to our gaze, but they do return our sounds back to our ears. (…) Hearing structures and articulates the experience and understanding of space. We are not normally aware of the significance of hearing in spatial experience, al-though sound often provides the temporal continuum in which visual impressions are embedded. When the soundtrack is removed from a film, for instance, the scene loses its plasticity and sense of continuity and life. 3

According to Pallasmaa, sound is, therefore, essential in human sensory awareness. Urban Studies reveal how the exploration of the city is affected by our ability to store images. Kevin Lynch observes,

Environmental images are the result of a two-way process between the observ-er and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer – with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes – selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees. The image so de-veloped now limits and emphasizes what is seen, while the image itself is being tested against the filtered perceptual input in a constant interacting process, thus the image of a given reality may vary significantly between different observers.4

1 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (Harmondsworth, Middx., Engl: Penguin Books, 1972).2 Kevin Lynch, Good City Form. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).3 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2005). 49 - 50.4 Kevin Lynch, The image of the city. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 6.

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However, our memory is not only influenced by our visual memory but also by oth-ers senses. Sound and memory are closely linked, as well as smell or taste. Research on the perception of urban spaces has neglected for years the significant role that sound plays, for better or for worse, in the urban context, as Emily Brady wrote in “Sniffing and Savouring: The Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes”. She notes that “one general reason why smells and tastes have been neglected in philosophical aesthet-ics stems from their association with that which is base. They are associated with the body and with non human animals and relegated to the realm of the crude, so called lower pleasure”. 5

Sounds contribute, along with images and smells, to the recognition of an identity of a place. Sounds and smells are often ignored by city planners, or even treated as something to be resisted and annihilated. Sounds contribute to the construction of a place. The combination of natural sounds to those induced by human activities, cre-ate a unique synergy.

The goal of this project is, as I have already described, to encourage people to listen and become aware of their surrounding soundscape. This project began by asking: In what ways can sound be used to perceive the city (Figure 3)? Research en plein air and development of a prototyping process was key to exploring these questions (Fig-ure 4). Sounds can be perceived in different ways, sometimes too strong, sometimes annoying, sometimes simply “out of place.” How can sound be reframed in contexts which are pleasant and acceptable to the human ear? It is not just a matter of positive-ly accepting what is happening and listening to the sounds with better preparation; I think it’s more a matter of how to interpret what we feel.

The idea is to learn how to isolate sounds that are considered unpleasant and to perceive them as a stimulus that can be part of something not necessarily unpleasant through interpretation and knowledge. From psychiatrist Hans Berger, the inventor of electroencephalography, I have learned to interpret sound physically and we have considered how it affects the brain. From arts and music, I know now how to create an ideal sound around us that allows us to reflect both creatively and psychologically.

5 Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 179.


Using the framework put forth by Raymond Murray Schafer, a composer, writer, music educator and environmentalist, this work will show that it is possible to per-ceive the world as a great macrocosmic musical composition.6

Besides the sensory data, there is the work of recognition and classification of sounds, which occurs according to predetermined categories, suggested by Schafer: continu-ous sounds, repetitive sounds, those which appear only once; natural sounds, human, or technological; loud sounds or weak; pleasant or unpleasant; internal or external; sounds that are still, in motion, or moving with us. The attention given to the sounds and their perception is the basis of my research.

The way to interpret the environment is determined by the interaction of the biolog-ical structure of the brain and its ability to develop. Knowledge of the physical struc-ture of the sound adds information that the body can not perceive. In the book Art of Noises in 1916, the futurist Luigi Russolo turned sound into an extraordinary musical experience. In his compositions all sounds have the same aesthetic dignity:

Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable an-imality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flap-ping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, print-ing works, electric power stations and underground railways. We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically. To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular move-ments and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give grada-tion and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations. Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibra-tions which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity. Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations. 7

The sounds that surround us, following the teachings of Luigi Russolo, are to be con-sidered an asset to our knowledge. The environment around us is a great symphony that becomes an important part of our being.

6 Murray Schafer. The Soundscape. (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977).7 Luigi Russolo. The Art of Noises. (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986.) 5.

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Figure 3. Perception of the city.

Figure 4. Research en plein air.


METHODOLOGY

I started my research reading about sound and perception doing soundwalks around the 101 district of Reykjavik, bringing with me a sound recorder and a camera. I recorded 237 different sounds, following my sound walk in the Reykja-vik city map. I recorded a variety of typical soundmarks in the Reykjavik sound-scape, focusing my research on 12 different typological areas: Airport, Bus Station, Harbor, National Hospital, Concert Hall, Park, the Pond, Residential Dis-trict, Shopping District, Stadium, Swimming Pool and University (Figure 5). While walking, I recorded sounds and took notes and pictures of the are-as explored. I identified my path using open source software OpenStreetM-ap3. This process helped me to classify the sounds I collected at each location. In my soundwalk, I detected that some pleasant sounds are produced by sources which are visually unpleasant, as well as the fact that unpleasant sounds can be produced from visually pleasant sources. Visual and mental perception can affect data generated by the brain positively or negatively, thus distorting the aesthetic perception of reality.

During the soundwalk, I increasingly focused upon tasks of attentive listening. Ur-ban soundscapes are similarly designed. These twelve Reykjavik environments are a mix of overlapping natural and human sounds.

I followed Schafer’s sound classification: nature, music, indoor, transport, mechan-ical and society. 8 (Figure 6). When I analyzed the sounds collected, and I tried to find an analogy between the sounds of the city and music sound of nature or musical instruments.

I used Praat software to compare the sound spectrogram and to find strong analogies between sounds in order to classify and compare music spectograms and soundwaves to the sounds of the city. This was done in order to discover the essence of the sound, indentifying similarities and differences, and analyzing shapes, data and patterns. I classified sounds according to physical characteristics (figure 7). The first param-eter I examined is that of pitch. According to the physics work of Campbell and Greated, pitch is used to define the quality of a sound that to understand if the sound is “high” or “low.” Sound, in acoustics field, is a property of the vibration of particles in a medium.

8 Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape. Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977.

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Figure 5. Typological areas.

reykjavik harbour


Jeremy Starpoli observes,

A sound created in air is a vibration of the air particles themselves, acted on by the expenditure of energy. This energy displaces the air particles immediately around it, causing them to crowd the adjacent particles, thereby increasing the pressure. When the original particles return to their position, this causes the second set of particles to follow, which decreases the pressure in that area. This alternation of compression and rarefaction causes a wave, much like the ripples of a stone thrown into a pond. The sound wave expands out into air in all directions, and loses energy by being absorbed by surfaces, eventually dying out unless more energy is expend-ed at the source. If we graph the displacement of energy over time, we can view the waveform of a sound, which is one of many useful visual representations in sound analysis. For a sound to be heard as a pitch, it must consist of many cycles of a sound wave, and one cycle of the wave is the return of a particle to its origin after being displaced in both positive and negative directions. The number of these cy-cles per second determines the frequency of the wave. The standard unit of meas-urement of frequency is the Hertz (Hz), a term synonymous with cycles per second. If a cycle repeats itself exactly over a specific time interval, known as the peri-od, then the resulting wave is called a periodic wave. Mathematically, the simplest

SOUNDSCAPE

Figure 6. Schafer’s sound classification: nature, music, indoor, transport, mechanical and society.

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example of a periodic wave is a sine wave, which theoretically repeats indefinitely over time, therefore having a constant frequency. A sine wave that has a frequen-cy of 440 Hz, for example, causes the air particles around it to be displaced from their original positions (in both directions) 440 times in one second.9

The intensity of a sound is represented visually on the spectogramme. The hori-zontal axis (x) represent the time (t), the ordinate axis (y) represent the frequency (Hz). The intensity of the sound, in my anlysis, is represented in gray scale. Higher intensities of color correspond to a higher intensity of sound. Using soundwaves and spectrograms, it is possible to find similarities and differences between two sounds. I used this analytical method to find similarities between sounds that may appear very different on a superficial level.

In my research I was looking for something related to the brain activities. I would like to understand if the brain reacts to sound in different way when we know what sound is and if we are prepared to receive knowledge from that.

Engineer and researcher Kyriaki Kalimeri is studying how brain waves change for the blind during a walk through the city of Reykjavik.

I analyzed her research to understand the user experience of the virtually impaired when navigating in unfamiliar outdoor environments assisted by mobility technolo-gies. She proposed a framework for assessing their cognitive-emotional experience based on ambulatory monitoring and multimodal fusion of electroencephalography, electrodermal activity, and blood volume pulse signals. 10

I decided to use the same instrument (a Scientific Contestual EEG) to detect how the brain works in the presence of city sound.

To understand the reactions of sensors to sounds, I traced the path I soundwalked with a Brain Computer Interface and Scientific Contextual EEG to map my brain ac-tivity and its changes to the onset of a noise. Given the practical constraints involved in an outdoor mobility study, EPOC+ was chosen because it provides a good com-promise between performance (i.e. number of channels and scientific validity of the acquired EEG signals) and usability (i.e. outdoor portability, preparation time and us-er comfort) with respect to other commercial wireless EEG systems (Figure 8).

9 Jeremy Starpoli. A method of musical composition based on sound analysis. (Amherst: Hampshire College, 2002). 12-13.10 Saitis Charalampos and Kyriaki Kalimeri. Identifying Urban Mobility Challenges for the Visually Impaired with Mobile Monitoring of Multimodal Biosignals. (Turin: ISI Foundation, 2016.)


Figure 7. Sound analysis.

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The results have been amazing for me. A known sound, although strong or sudden, creates a minor reaction, and therefore less stress, compared to an unknown sound.

At this point, I began to translate the data at my disposal into the journey rules. As explained by Darren Copeland and Nadene Thériault-Copeland,

People can shape ideas about the world and themselves just by listening to the associa-tions triggered by sounds. Here is one example:Is it true that the blind live in their bodies rather than in the world? I am aware of my body just as I am aware of the rain. My body is similarly made up of many patterns, many different regularities and irregularities, extend-ed in space from down there to up here. These dimensions and details reveal themselves more and more as I concentrate my attention upon them. Nothing corresponds visually to this realization. Instead of having an image of my body, as being in what we call the “human form,” I apprehend it now as these arrangements of sensitivities, a conscious space compa-rable to the patterns of falling rain.(…) On the basis of such listening, can one ever approach the enormous task of reading the acoustic environment as a record of social experience? 11

Following Copeland´s work, and by analyzing the data I collected, I understood how the perception of sounds is strictly linked with knowledge: two sounds can be regarded as similar in their structure and, heard in a neutral environment, they can be considered very closely. Yet the same ear may perceive sounds as good or bad de-pending on their context. Once you understand the sounds and recontextualise them

11 Darren Copeland, http://www.darrencopeland.net. (retrieved 2/03/2016).

Figure 8. EPOC+. (Ph. Fabio Del Percio)


in a new environment, their perception will be different again. I began to understand how to tell a story using sounds as protagonists, placing them

in different contexts and comparing them to each other, which can be a valid exercise of understanding and reworking the soundscape. Players of the Journey I have de-signed will be able to understand the problems of the city and find solutions through the similarities between sounds, using their comprehension of sound.

Originating as an investigation into the soundscape, this Journey, called Reykjavik Soundscape, is a joyful way to understand and transform the soundscape of the city.

It is a vehicle for creative expression.The Journey through sound offers a stimulating context which encourages open-

mindedness, cooperation and creativity. It is a fun educational tool for creative people. It enhances creativity, and also promotes idea generation and design thinking, while raising awareness of environmental and social issues.

The experience is developed through the use of storytelling. The storytelling meth-odology is the use of narrative procedures in order to better promote human values and ideas, and focuses on influencing social dynamics. Through the narration, it is possible to create a reflective tool for interpreting reality.

Storytelling is a tool used to penetrate deep into the causes and reasons of events, details of which are recounted build a story, become real and determine the story itself. Sound can be used to perceive the world, the city and the environment. It can be used for design, using improvised mental association and ideas. This project illustrates that sound is a good way to provide users tools for making decisions, judgments and interventions. Many tests were done for the first prototypes. I played with some designers and some sensory and visual da-ta engineers. The designers helped me to improve the rules of storytelling. The engineers helped me to compare in better way the sound and data to arrive at the final result.

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RULES

THE JOURNEY INCLUDES:

1 playing board6 markers60 SOUND cards60 SITUATION cards1 hourglass1 die1 guidebook

INTRODUCTION:

The Reykjavik Soundscape is a joyful way to understand and transform the Sound-scape of the city. It is about looking at the sound and create experience, seeing reac-tion and perception. The Reykjavik Soundscape is appropriate for players age 14 and older. It can be played by two to six players. The Reykjavik Soundscape encourages openness, cooperation and sharing. It is a fun educational tool for creative people. It enhances creativity, and also promotes idea generation and design thinking, while raising awareness of environmental and social issues.

PREPARATION:

Players each need a pen and paper.• Set the board so that each player is seated in front of one city walking path.• Shuffle each cards deck: Sound cards and Situation cards, face down, on the

appropriate location on the Journey Board.

GROUP PLAYING FOCUS:

Begin by choosing a particular group issue that you are currently dealing with, one that you would like to resolve by playing the Reykjavik Soundscape.

Your experience in the Reykjavik Soundscape will provide clarity, understanding, feed-back and new direction on your specific issue. The Reykjavik Soundscape will reach to the heart of your issue and move you as deeply as you are willing to experience.


START

Players roll the die to see who gets the highest number. Whoev-er rolls the highest number will take the first turn. Roll the die and move forward that number of spaces with your marker. Example: If you roll a four, move your piece forward four squares. Read the symbol on the square you land on and follow the instructions for that symbol.

• NORMAL SQUARE: take one SOUND card and one SIT-UATION card. The player has one minute to tell a story set in the city situation where the marker on the board is located, using the reality described by the SIT-UATION card. The player must tell a story using the word and and a sound he considers synonymous to the one found on the SOUND card. That means sounds the player thinks are similar. Example: Thunder = Car Engine Navy sirens = Trumpet Ship ropes = Potato Chips Pack

At the end of the minute, all opponents must take note of the word associations made by the storytelling player. In turn, the opponents name the two words that seemed to them most suspect in the history. Then, the storytelling player reveals the words she put into the story. If no one has discovered the words, the player can immediately re-play. If not, the next player will roll the die and move.

• WAVES SQUARE: Team meeting. It is time to re-think the group issue for 3 minutes.• BUS SQUARE: The player will take a bus to go to the area indicated on the playing board. Note: Every story has to be related in some way to the group focus.

PURPOSE OF THE Journey: The aim of the Journey is to get to the end of the path.

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CONCLUSION

My research contributes to the growing body of literature on how people can ex-perience the environment and, in this particular case, the city. I have researched how we can perceive sound and how we can hear the soundscape. I have tested the rela-tionship between sound and visual representation, sound and the brain, sound and intuitive mental association and finally, I designed a tool to experience sound using intuition, design method and team work. This work examines the themes of the ur-ban soundscape through a journey to allow others to experience it, using the design process.

A narrative journey, as I have already mentioned, that through the sound offers a stimulating context which encourages openmindedness, cooperation and creativity. A narration can create a reflective tool for interpreting reality, to penetrate deep into the causes and reasons of events.

I hope this work can empower designers, researchers, urban planners or just any-one who wants to become more aware of their experience of sound, by offering them methodological tools to rethink the role of sound. Different urban scenarios were compared, aiming to understand the soundscape, exploring the connections between sounds and perception through the cultural aspects and the rules of physics contained within sound.


APPENDIX

In the exhibition room, it is possible to hear a looped musical composition created using all the sounds that I recorded in the city and, at the same time, the bodily impuls-es that were recorded through the analysis of brain waves. The aim of this symphony is to represent the data I collected in the city soundscape and the human perception data and turn them into a “sound language.”

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Reykjavik Soundscape.

department of design and architecture master of design

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